Why Provider Strategies Must Make Room for Data

Christine Holloway is vice president of CDW Healthcare, a leading provider of technology solutions to healthcare organizations.

Whether looking to improve patient care quality or organizational efficiency, healthcare leaders I know almost all agree that at the heart of those efforts must be an investment in data and analytics.

Recent surveys seem to support this. For instance, according to research conducted by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions late last year, health systems are more likely to have defined strategies around analytics, departments dedicated to leveraging Big Data and executive leadership roles focused solely on managing data. Eighty-four percent of the 56 health system CIOs, CTOs and chief analytics executives surveyed said that analytics will be important to their organizational strategies over the next few years.

Care Organizations Tap Data Approaches to Best Fit Needs

It’s interesting to see the different ways organizations use and benefit from an increased focus on analytics and leveraging data. According to a survey of 110 hospital and health system leaders by HIMSS Analytics, 90 percent of respondents currently leveraging analytics solutions are doing so in clinical areas. About 86 percent of respondents are using analytics in financial areas, while 77 percent are focused on operational areas.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to how or why organizations are taking advantage of data and analytics solutions.

Providers Build a Foundation for Data Success

Investing in a data strategy doesn’t just mean deploying solutions to process and visualize information, however. Building a proper foundation is critical to ensuring such efforts can even get off the ground.

At Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, S.D., a virtualization solution helped the organization create a virtual data warehouse that links together the system’s different applications.

“We have spent the last seven or eight years building this foundation of data, and we’re living on a mountain of it,” she said. “Now we’re able to use that data to turn it into machine learning and artificial intelligence, tools that lower the cognitive burden for not only the caregivers and the clinical team but also for patients as they’re making choices in the healthcare system.”

Healthcare Data Will Only Grow in Importance

These trends will almost certainly persist as providers continue to prioritize data-driven planning. Increasingly, strategies that revolve around leveraging data and analytics capabilities will not only be beneficial but necessary to keep pace in a highly competitive healthcare landscape.

For healthcare organizations on the fence, there’s no time like the present to start planning for your future.